You can't miss: blog redesigns and renovations

During this past week, The Ministry of Type has posted new articles four times. The blog apparently hadn't been updated because the owner was redesigning the blog. The new blog is easier to navigate, and the overall design is cleaner and more streamlined.

The owner also redesigned the blog's logo, which is something that was of special interest to me since I just finished working on logo designs for SJI. Here's a screenshot from the site that shows the logo's progression over the years. I really like the new, simplified logo. I generally think that when a design element is simplified, it almost always looks better. Thus far, this ideology has held true based on my experiences with VOX Magazine.

You should definitely check it out when you have a chance.

After getting acquainted with the new display, I started thinking about why blog redesigns can be good. I began searching to find some good information about bettering a blog. BloggingExperiment.com outlines some of the benefits that can come from redesigning a blog. If you're interested in professionally blogging for a company, AnotherBlogger.com offers advice on how to build a better company blog. The advice in both of these articles can be applied to personal blogs for those wanting to increase their readership, so get to reading and rejuvenating.

Critique: final SJI logos

This week I reworked my top five SJI logos that had been selected from the original 20 concepts. The main change I made was working with a different color palette to give the logos a more professional feel. I also changed up a few of the typefaces so that the logos had a subtle reference to sports. The Columbia Missourian's sports editor came in and collaborated with our design instructors to choose our best two logos, which we each revised one final time.

here are my five revised concepts

and here are the final two logos that will be submitted to SJI

This logo is meant to represent the forward progress SJI provides for women and minority journalists when it comes to sports reporting.

The stick figures are running, signifying forward progress into the future. The suggestion of movement also refers to action in sports as well as journalists who are constantly on the move.

The type refers to uniforms that one would see in a number of sporting events.

Each figure is a different color to show that they are each unique individuals, yet their body motion is synchronized to symbolize their unity in achieving forward progress.

This logo draws attention to the organization's emphasis on sports reporting in the newsroom.

The figures come from three very different sports (even though they all feature balls). The greenish yellow ball can refer either to softball or tennis, both of which feature prominent female athletes.

The colors, bold lines and use of type are intended to relate to a young audience, as the organization aims to assist young aspiring sports journalists.

Can't wait to see whose logo concept SJI chooses to represent its mission.

Critique: Sports Journalism Institute logo drafts

Media outlets unquestionably work to attract and maintain audiences, and the public perception of an enterprise is key for its proliferation. This is why effective branding is such a hot commodity. When professionals begin setting up a new enterprise, one of the most important branding components they should consider is the logo.

The mission

The Sports Journalism Institute has recently formed an alliance with the Missouri School of Journalism. SJI has been working to diversify newsrooms since its inception in 1992. The primary goal of the organization is to help women and minorities get access to jobs within the sports department of news publications.

According to the SJI website, "The Sports Journalism Institute will bring its 10-day crash course in sports journalism to the Missouri School of Journalism beginning in June 2012.

To help celebrate this new partnership, the advanced magazine design capstone was given the opportunity to create potential logos for SJI, which currently uses no visual branding. Each student created 20 different logo concepts that were whittled down to our five strongest during a critique. We will rework these five, and SJI will choose one of them from the 100 logos submitted. The whole process is a really great learning experience for us.

The process
I found brainstorming logo concepts for this project to be challenging. The ultimate goal of a logo is to encompass the basic ideology of a brand (like a company or organization) in one attention-grabbing visual. The purpose of SJI is to infuse three very different components: sports, journalism and minorities. (The fact that they shouldn't actually be considered so dissimilar is exactly why the organization exists). Incorporating all three of these components into one visual required a lot of careful consideration.

In summary, I thought about how to represent advancement. This is why I worked with the idea of arrows and movement, which is intended to represent forward progress. I obviously worked sports into about a third of the designs. I also tried to use color in a number of different ways. So, these are what I came up with.

I'll go into more detail about the thought process behind my logos when I critique my five finalized logos next week.

You can't miss: branding and logo redesigns

As the due date for our 20/10 logo competition looms, I've been looking for some more inspirtion on how to branding and designing a successful company logos. The blog I've been following, Ministry of Type, features an article that showcases some really successful logo redesign concepts by Antrepo for products that range from Pringles to Durex condoms. Generally, the new concepts are much simpler (in a precise, content driven way, of course) than the originals. It's important to note that these redesigns are neither commissioned by the companies nor implied to be actual the designer as redesign proposals.

Image courtesy Ministry of Type

I'm not a fan of the simplified Corn Flakes box, as it doesn't really entice me to buy the cereal. I don't think the new Pringles cans are too great, either, but that might just be because the two examples shown are red and green, ha. I do find the Durex box and Nutella jar to be especially successful, though.

Michelle Pais showed me this really cool website last week, and I wanted to share it with you guys, too. Under Consideration.com maintains a few different, really interesting design blogs. One of them is Brand New, a blog that looks at company branding and logo redesigns. They're really cool and modern, and they might be helpful for everybody to look at as we develop logos for our 20/10 project.